SPECIAL EP: On Fertility and Finding Your Family… with Rebecca Coxon

0:00Rebecca Coxon:Obviously, I'm so grateful that he decided to donate and to all the donors who do donate because I wouldn't be here. So it's that really kind of existential gratitude, but also just sort of wanting to keep him at arm's length. And the amount of men who, when you asked them if they wanted children, said they hadn't thought about it, even though they were in their mid-30s, was astonishing. I was told that my ovarian reserve was low. So essentially, I had the eggs of a kind of 40-year-old in my early 30s.

0:34Elizabeth Day:Growing up in rural Nottinghamshire, Rebecca Coxon was drawn to telling other people's stories. She became an award-winning documentary maker whose credits included 24 hours in police custody and Channel 4's dispatches. But it was while working on a documentary called The Family Secret in 2019 that Coxon discovered one of her own. A 23andMe DNA test revealed that her father was not biologically related to her. Confronted by this shocking revelation, Coxon started mapping out the story of her own existence. She had always known she was one of four IVF siblings and herself a triplet. but a conversation with her mother revealed that she was actually donor-conceived.

1:22Elizabeth Day:The long-buried secrets uncovered by her genes led her to examine what family really means and how her own remarkable conception offered profound insights into how we choose to create new life. Coxon, who was moved to donate her own eggs and who has undergone fertility treatment herself, has now shared this extraordinary story in a book. Inconceivable is a beautiful meditation on what it means to belong. It is also, I'm so proud to say, the first book to be published under my own imprint, Big Day. And I could not be more thrilled to be championing this utterly essential work. So today on How to Fail, we're doing something a little different.

2:10Elizabeth Day:As many of you already know, I have been through my own fertility journey and I'm passionate about bringing these necessary conversations to the fore. So instead of our regular three failure format, this is going to be a free weeding, wide ranging chat with Rebecca on fertility, family and the leaps of faith we take in loving other humans.

2:35Rebecca Coxon:Rebecca Cox and welcome to How to Fail. Thank you so much for having me.

2:39Elizabeth Day:It's so surreal being here. Oh my gosh, it's such a pleasure to have you here sitting opposite me. I am so proud of this book and so proud of you for the courage it must have taken to write it and for the courage it took to go on that journey in the first place. And I wonder if I could start by asking you to take us back to that moment when you got the DNA test results and as the realisation slowly began to dawn, and how that felt where were you take us to that scene yeah so originally I'd signed up to 23andMe

3:14Rebecca Coxon:and when I logged on uh you know it said I only had distant relatives it told me about my health profile um and there was nothing really to see um and I'd sort of told my family when I went home to see them they sort of just looked at it and and shrugged and sort of said oh that's that's interesting you know I'm I'm part you know my ancestors are from Scandinavia or whatever and that was it. And then a few years later, I was reading an article in the news about a lady with a gene for breast cancer. And I thought, oh, I'll just log back onto the DNA website and check if I've got that gene. Because I know they're updating everything all the time.

3:51Rebecca Coxon:And I was sat at work, as you say, working on this documentary called The Family Secret, coincidentally. And I was just sat in the edit suite and it said new it had this relatives tab that said it had been updated and I clicked on it and it said half sister Lucy on the paternal side and I sort of just froze and thought that doesn't make any sense I don't have any half siblings and then I just went outside and called my mum and said this really weird thing has happened do you know anything about it her first response was shock and um denial I guess she so my dad was adopted so she sort of said well maybe it's something to do with his side of the family and I said oh yeah maybe maybe it's a long-lost cousin that we don't know about something because the DNA shared was 25 percent which can be a sort of aunt or or um niece or something um but the more I looked into it I I realized, you know, it's unlikely to be incorrect.

4:59Rebecca Coxon:You know, there's a lot of people Googling these things saying, I've got the wrong DNA results. And most of the time it's not a wrong DNA result. You know, it's a family secret. So I ended up going home that weekend anyway because we were celebrating Easter. We always gather for Easter as a family. And I sort of confronted my parents and said, what is going on? And that's when they admitted to having used a sperm donor.

5:27Elizabeth Day:So your own fertility journey plays into the narrative of inconceivable as well. And you write very movingly about suffering with endometriosis and how that threw a massive curveball into your own plans for your own family. what was it like for you writing about something that has so shaped your life and shaped it in a

5:56Rebecca Coxon:very painful way endometriosis is getting more sort of airtime recently which is great um people seem to be more aware of what it is and how difficult it can be to live with however the the things that i've read about it tend to be kind of more textbook or academic or medical and I really wanted to make the experience of living in a body with endometriosis relatable and also sort of like crafted in a kind of really readable way. So, you know, I talk about it feeling like a cactus through my colon and the steel plumbing of my pelvis, you know, things like that where I just think it gets described as a painful disease, but it doesn't and it is painful.

6:44Rebecca Coxon:But for me, the whole body inflammation where your immune system is attacking itself is the best way to describe it and help people understand the day-to-day experience of it. It's more like living with bone-aching flu. That can affect you on so many levels. It makes you tired. It affects the way you think. You have brain fog. Like, you know, I've got it on my bowels and my bladder. So, you know, going to the toilet or sex can be quite painful sometimes. But yeah, it takes a lot from you. We're not taking it seriously enough and it's really underfunded still. We don't really know what causes it.

7:25Rebecca Coxon:But it is affecting hundreds of millions of women and girls in the world to the level where they're living in this state of half sickness that I described, where you're not quite ill enough to stay in bed. but you can't function properly and how that affects, you know, your social life, your work life, you know, and that's not even discussing the infertility side of it, which can, you know, which affected my mum and me, which has its own, you know, grief. And, you know, as you well know, you know, living with infertility is another kind of pain.

7:59Elizabeth Day:In the midst of all of this, you decide because of how you've realised that you were conceived, that you want to give someone else that opportunity and you decide to donate your eggs. And I was fascinated to read about that because, as you might know, I went through a round of egg donation on the other side where someone was generous enough to donate their eggs to me. And I found it a profoundly moving part of the book to read it from your perspective. Tell us about that decision and about that process.

8:33Rebecca Coxon:weirdly I'd always been interested in the ethics of fertility and again another weird coincidence when I found out I was done conceived I was already pitching a documentary series idea to well with the production company I was working with to a channel about donor eggs in the US because it's a very different sort of market over there you know they get paid tens of thousands of pounds of dollars sometimes and it's a bit like tinder you can sort of swipe through and choose Rebecca, I did it in the US. You did it. You know all about it.

9:06Elizabeth Day:You're totally right. That's the analogy I often reached for.

9:09Rebecca Coxon:Yeah.

9:10Elizabeth Day:That I was sort of swiping through all of these gorgeous women being like, oh, is her hair brown enough? It was sort of horrific. Yeah.

9:18Rebecca Coxon:I mean, that's the world we live in. It's interesting. My parents didn't have anything like that. They just let the hospital decide. You know, there wasn't any sort of apps or anything. So I'd been researching egg donation anyway. Then I found out I was donor conceived. and then the pandemic hit and I just thought you know what I know people who are struggling with infertility I would love to have kids soon but my partner's not ready so I'm just flushing these eggs down the toilet you know I may as well you know I know how valuable these things can be and and that there is a shortage of egg donors in some parts of the UK I'm going to sign up as an egg donor so I called I found an agency on the line that does it there's various ways you can do it Um, and I also thought they can check my fertility for me.

10:04Rebecca Coxon:You know, I was nearing 30. I had endometriosis. Um, what state is my fertility in? And you can get a little bit of an indicator of that, um, when they check your AMH levels. Um, so there was that you do get paid expenses. Um, so that was just a little bonus because I'd lost all my work. Um, as a result of the pandemic, I worked in TV, um, and everything shut down for a little bit. I mean it will always be one of the things I'm most proud of in my life it's you know I got the most beautiful letter from my recipient um and having been donor conceived myself you know you just think I wouldn't be here without somebody like me doing that um so yeah I didn't I didn't think very much about it I just sort of went ahead and did it um and yeah I have no regrets I didn't even find it a particularly difficult process um which I know you know injecting your belly and stuff obviously is but it was sort of just a means to an end and yeah the process went quite straight was quite straightforward for me it makes me tear up hearing about it and it made

11:17Elizabeth Day:me cry reading about it because it's such an extraordinarily generous thing for you to have done. And then that letter that you got from the recipient was so beautiful and you had to wait a few years, but they went on to have a baby. So thank you for the gift that you gave someone who was really struggling with their own fertility. It's so amazing. And my experience of egg donation, And even though it didn't end with a baby in my arms taught me so much. And my husband and I did do it in LA. So we had that experience of, and we're privileged enough that we were able to set aside money to pay the thousands of dollars that were required.

11:58Elizabeth Day:And we had that experience of going through agency websites and they give you these questionnaires that the donor completes. You can see photos of them. You can even have a Zoom call. You can meet them in person sometimes. And it was a profound, but also unintentionally darkly comic period, because the questionnaire, the questions would be things like, what's your favourite food? What are your favourite books? And I automatically discounted anyone who said that their favourite book was either Harry Potter, because that just felt like it's too easy, or Paolo Coelho, who I interviewed once and didn't like.

12:34Elizabeth Day:And so you suddenly realise like what things, what stupid little things you think are important. And then as time went on and it was harder and harder actually to find a donor, all of that went out of the window. But the donor that we eventually found, and I'm sharing this with you because it has resonance to your family story, was adopted. And it meant that many people didn't want her eggs because you didn't have a full genetic history. Whereas I thought, gosh, how wonderful that here is this person who has this full conception of what family really is and the choices that we make. And I also loved her because her favourite book was Plato's Republic, which is one of mine.

13:16Elizabeth Day:Anyway, I remember sending her a message very like your recipient sent you. And it moved me thinking that her reaction would have been like yours. So thank you. And to anyone who is listening or watching this, who has either donated their eggs or their sperm or has gone through a round of donor conception and maybe has their baby now, I just want to salute you and say that we see you. And it's such an extraordinary process. And as Rebecca, you've said, family, really there are so many different ways to grow one and thank you for giving us the chance to speak openly about it so you donated your eggs and then there's a period of time where um these are my words you are dating extremely disappointing men and this is another thing that i feel like we've had in common and maybe many people who uh are are part of this show will also have in common with you but it's not that they're bad men it's just that they don't go through with things and men have that privilege at a certain age can you tell us about James and what happened with him

14:33Rebecca Coxon:there tends to be in my experience a kind of lack of awareness of the finiteness of fertility for women from from men um there also tends to be you know I I ended up dating again in my early thirties and the amount of men who, when you asked them if they wanted children, said they hadn't thought about it, even though they were in their mid thirties, it was astonishing.

14:59Elizabeth Day:Yes.

14:59Rebecca Coxon:You know, because as a woman, you know, you've been thinking about it since you were 15, you know, how to avoid getting pregnant, when you might want to get pregnant. You know, it's on your mind every month that you have a period. So for men to sort of, yeah, in their leisurely in their sort of 30s think well maybe one day but not have put any thoughts into it or even know was a real shock um especially when you know like me I was I felt like I was running on a treadmill double the speed of everyone else because you know my endometriosis getting worse every month my I was told that my ovarian reserve was low um you know so essentially I had the eggs of a kind of 40 year old in my early 30s.

15:43Rebecca Coxon:And you do, you feel like you're running out of time. And you're also really aware that any kind of whiff of desperation or wanting a family scares people off.

15:55Rebecca Coxon:So yeah, so with James, you know, I made it clear very early on that I, you know, I'd been diagnosed with endometriosis, the doctor had said, you know, don't leave it very long to have children you know in in the next few years um so he knew that and um you know he sort of said i'm not i'm not ready yet but soon soon um a few years went by and you know i was like you know my my endometriosis is is really hard and the sort of irony of endometriosis is that um often pregnancy is touted as a cure it's not a cure there is no cure but for some people it can ease the symptoms. So there's also that sort of, you know, I'm living with this chronic illness that I also, you know, would love to have some respite from.

16:43Rebecca Coxon:Coming off the pill exacerbates the symptoms of endometriosis. So you're kind of living in this catch 22 where when you start trying, your endometriosis gets worse, but you also struggle to get pregnant. But pregnancy can

16:57Elizabeth Day:also be a kind of cure.

16:59Rebecca Coxon:So yeah, it's quite a complicated thing to navigate. But I was ready for children and James was not. So that went on for a few years. And then finally he said, okay, let's go for it. We were actively trying, nothing happened. And so I was getting a bit worried at the stage. And I think, you know, probably my family's history set off alarm bells and made it all feel, you know, like, okay, well, I'm infertile, just like my mum. And, you know I need to hurry up with this so I feel there was there was a lot of pressure but we we were referred for IVF but unfortunately a few days before the egg retrieval James sat me down and said actually I'm I'm still not ready I don't I can't go through with this and it was just it was just so devastating you know as you can imagine it was just everything collapsed overnight um we ended up breaking up a few weeks later and yeah my sort of future children you know the prospects of my future family which I thought well maybe this is it this is my only this is my only chance my in-laws you know they'd they all disappeared and I was just back to square one um yeah it was a really really terrible time

18:22Elizabeth Day:devastating i can't well i can imagine i suppose i can only imagine what that was like to go through because so often with infertility there is so much painful ambiguity and what you're grieving is an absence and a loss that was never fully present in the first place so whether it's miscarriage or constantly being told by mostly male clinicians that you are failing in some way there's so much complexity in the sadness that you're experiencing and then to have not only your support system but the the key part of the process of IVF just leave you must have been unbelievably destabilizing. And it's such an interesting one because obviously people are allowed not to be ready.

19:24Elizabeth Day:And I don't want to sort of hang out any individual men to dry here. But I have had very similar experiences where, as you say, there is vanishingly little education given actually to any gender, let alone young boys, about the limits of fertility. And like you, Rebecca, the only thing that I was ever taught was to avoid a teenage pregnancy. So I went straight on the pill for 14 years as soon as I became sexually active and then really struggled to get pregnant. And some of the men that I dated had this privilege of being able to say, I'm not ready. But part of that privilege was their firm belief that they would meet someone who would open up the gift of their ovaries and their womb to them at the notional point that they might suddenly feel ready.

20:17Elizabeth Day:And I was like, gosh, that is an entitlement, the levels of which I as a woman have never experienced. And so it's come to fruition. I mean, those men have gone on and they have had babies with the people that they met when they were ready. But I think that you identify so potently in your book, Inconceivable, how just aggressively awful it is when you feel trapped in the ticking clock of your own biology. Well done for getting through that, quite frankly. And we're going to circle back to how your fertility journey has progressed. but I wanted to ask you about your donor because you made the decision to meet him and in the book he's referred to as Rodney which is a pseudonym that he chose I believe and you have this line in the book where you say I was glad to know of his existence and quietly furious that he existed talk to me a little bit about that nuance and how that felt

21:25Rebecca Coxon:so I've only spoken to Rodney over video call um I haven't met him I've met up with him in real life which I don't think I ever will I only had to deal with not knowing who the donor was for about a year um some of my half siblings were in the dark for a lot longer than that and that year I really struggled because I think once you know about their existence and but you don't know who they are you know I thought he's a man probably in his 50s you know I work I work with loads of men in their 50s in tv you know I was like is he one of them have I passed him in the street is he a celebrity like is he homeless like who is he you just have no idea where you've come from so when he signed up to the DNA website a year later I was really relieved I was really curious obviously about you know who he was and what he looked like and that kind of thing and that was it really you know I that question was answered um you know I I'm really close with my dad I just did not want I did you know I had I didn't have a void there let's put it that way so I wasn't looking for anybody else and and I say in the book you know him coming into my life has felt a bit like somebody trespassing and putting a stake in the ground that says father but he you know I will I will I'll describe him as the donor you know he's not my father he's not my dad um it's taken me a long time to even sort of like logically I know that biologically I'm related to him but it's so removed from my experience um that it's taken me a long time to sort of accept that he you know I'm lucky that he has been open and generous with his time and he's answered any questions that me and my half siblings have um but it's a really complicated relationship because you know there's no manual for how you interact with your sperm donor um and I think people like to think that it'll be some sort of long lost family moment or something like that and it's just not been that at all obviously I'm so grateful that he decided to donate and to all the donors who do donate because I wouldn't be here.

23:43Rebecca Coxon:So it's that really kind of existential gratitude, but also just sort of wanting to keep him at arm's length because he didn't change any of our nappies. He didn't have anything to do with our upbringing. You know, he's just a random person, really.

23:58Elizabeth Day:You say at one point in the book, he says, I'm so proud of you all and that your hackles rose. Understandably, you did such a good job

24:06Rebecca Coxon:of explaining that yeah it's a really weird one because i understand what he's saying you know he's proud of what we've all achieved and he's seeing different parts of himself in the world but again it's that sort of you know he's not family and yet i donated as a direct result of him donating you know he inspired me you know we're all on this planet together and actually borrowing somebody else's eggs or sperm or embryos, we're all putting it back into the same pot. You know what I mean? And there's something really beautiful about that. And that's one of the reasons I think I donated my eggs was just because I just thought it's a way of paying it forward and just saying, you know, sometimes, you know, like baking cakes, sometimes we do run out of sugar or we do run out of eggs and we just need to go and ask our neighbor, you know, can I borrow some of yours?

24:55Rebecca Coxon:And there's nothing wrong with that. It's beautiful that we can share in that way.